There is a perceived need to improve the manner in which users are able to control groups of lighting units such as lamps, luminaries, spotlights and the like in household and commercial environments.
Certain existing control systems involve the use of an infrared (IR) remote control unit to interact with the different lighting units in the environment by transmitting IR control signals to each of the light units in the system that are equipped with IR communication module interfaces and processing circuitry so as to respond to the received IR signals. The use of an IR remote control can be problematic in that when a wide-beam IR remote control is simultaneously used to control a group lighting units, the wide-beam of the transmitted IR signal may inadvertently interfere with other lighting units not intended to be targeted but which happen to fall within the IR beam angle. A narrow-beam IR remote control having a more directionally-focused IR beam to target a lighting unit or group of lighting units may alleviate inadvertent interference with unrelated lighting units, however, this means that the narrow-beam IR remote control can generally only be used to control each lighting unit one at a time and this is a slow and laborious process when for instance activating or deactivating a large group of lighting units.
In alternate control systems, a smartphone may be configured to run a software application thereon to provide a user interface via which a user is able to interface with and control operation of various lighting units in a given environment via a WI-FI network. However, the use of a smartphone as the user-control device makes it difficult for the user to simultaneously used the smartphone for other functions such as making telephone calls, browsing the Internet or playing audio/video files.